Life’s kinda getting’ out of control. I think. I don’t know if you agree, will you hand me that ashtray? So, man, the other day I decided I might as well pull out that Vince Neil autobiography. I was a big Mötley Crüe fan when I was a teenager and got tired of Elton John, Boston, and Ted Nugent. They were cutting edge back then. The Crüe, that is… at least, that’s what I thought. What did I care, they fuckin’ rocked, they looked cool, and the chicks used to come out in droves for them. What more could a horny male teenager ask for? What’s that? I don’t know… shit! I dropped my coffee in my lap. Fuckin’ cat!

It’s like, what it is, it’s like… I know you’ve heard the phrase a thousand times, but it’s a rat race. So, where were we? Oh yeah. Mötley Crüe, Vince Neil. His autobiography, Tattoos & Tequila: To Hell and Back with One of Rock’s Most Notorious Frontmen, which came out a few months back. Unlike my fellow MetalSucks brethren, I actually used to like Vince Neil. [Uh... actually, we did, too, which is part of the reason we now give him so much shit! - Ed.] Hell, I even dressed up like him for a lip-synching contest way back in ’83. Even posted it here as one of my most embarrassing life moments. Lost to some teenyboppers singing Cyndi Lauper. “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun…” What a crock! Should’ve gone with “Looks That Kill” instead of “Piece of Your Action.” My bad. Used to love going to Fast Times in Pasadena, Texas, where they had those contests. Teens trying to act like adults. Lots of hot chicks, bad hairstyles, and people who hated heavy metal. Losers.

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Anyone who has survived a live Cro-Mags show can presume that a health and nutrition book penned by front man John Joseph “Bloodclot” McGowan is not going to be a touchy-feely affair. For the uninitiated, let’s just say Joseph’s motor has but a single setting: Pulverize. And it’s safe to assume that after having this man pound sand up their collective asses for sixty minutes, the corpulent contests on The Biggest Loser would be pleading for comparative nurturing ladled out weekly by Jillian Michaels.

Whoever coined the adage that you can’t judge a book by its cover likely never saw Meat Is For Pussies:A How-To Guide For Dudes Who Want To Get Fit, Kick Ass and Take Names staring out from a shelve at their local Borders. As the title oh-so-delicately suggests, Joseph’s second foray into publishing (his first being 2007’s autobiographical The Evolution of a Cro-Magnon) finds the singer sharing his opinions and insights on a variety of health-related topics, ranging from the health and ethical advantages of a no-meat diet, to the use of unsound food additives, to his favorite legume recipes, to the shadowy role of government, corporations and special-interest groups like the American Medical Association in the existing American food complex.

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I really wanted to like this book. I really did.

As an old school Hanoi Rocks fan, I assumed this would be an eye-opening tell-all by the man behind the band that spawned sleaze rock which was later ripped off by Guns N’ Roses and lesser lights such as L.A. Guns and Faster Pussycat. Instead, it’s just a big ol’ mess of discombobulated anecdotes that do not enlighten the uninitiated, enthrall those already on board the Hanoi train, nor excite undiscerning lovers of rock ‘n roll.

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My never-ending pursuit of rock star book excellence continues. This week it’s Saul Hudson of Guns N’ Roses fame with his 2007 autobiography Slash, co-authored by Anthony Bozza, and it is the epitome of a killer rock star autobiography.

I had serious doubts about whether or not I was going to like this book. First off, I have no love for Guns N’ Roses beyond Appetite for Destruction. I was one of the band’s biggest fans behind the strength of their Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide EP and AFD. Once Lies came out though, I was done. Couldn’t stand it (the non-Suicide tracks, that is) or them. So that was strike one.

Strike two came in the form of co-author Anthony Bozza, who also performed the same chores on Tommy Lee’s horrendous autobiography Tommyland (read my review here). What a terrible book that was; I lay much of the blame on Bozza’s shoulders.

Obviously, I was skeptical about reading Slash.

I’m happy to report that my skepticism was unfounded. Slash kicks ass!

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Next up on the heavy metal, hard rock, and punk rock book treadmill is Aerosmith drummer Joey Kramer’s 2009 autobiography Hit Hard: A Story of Hitting Rock Bottom at the Top.

The little-known drummer of one of the most successful bands in music history brings to the table a story rife with the things that make rock star books appealing to so many readers: sex, drugs, backstage hoo-ha, band squabbles, a troubled youth, and more. Only, it all seems to fall flat when it comes to rock star debauchery, as well as its other seemingly intended goal of providing a cautionary tale of drugs and schadenfreude.

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Ozzy Osbourne gets plenty of crap around here at the Mansion – much of it deserved, some not so much. Regardless of the punching bag the Ozz-man has become over the last decade, there is no denying he is the epitome of a metal legend.

He’s also one funny motherfucker!

Now it’s time to learn even more about the Prince of Darkness from his own garbled mouth in his first autobiography, I Am Ozzy, which hits U.S. shelves today. The book was released in the U.K. in 2009.

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Time for another look at an existing rock biography that may have escaped your literary radar. Last time, I reviewed Mötley Crüe’s Nikki Sixx’s excellent paean to self-pity and self-destruction, The Heroin Diaries. This time around, it’s his band mate, drug buddy, and human puppet toy, Tommy Lee’s 2004 autobiography Tommyland.

First off, Tommy Lee is a dick.

Or, rather, I should say; first off, Tommy Lee’s dick shoots off the festivities.

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I’ve always found metal logos to be fascinating. Shit, we even have a weekly contest based on ‘em. I once penned a blog post for another website proclaiming death metal the best of all metal sub-genres because it had the coolest logos; maybe that piece will see the light of day some time soon. But there’s just something so great about metal logos… you [can often] know loosely what a band will sound like just from the particular style of their logo. I don’t think this is true for other genres of music, but maybe one of our readers with a deeper knowledge of, say, indie rock can tell me why I’m wrong.

The German design book publisher Gestalten is publishing a book on this very topic — specifically black metal logos — by Chrisophe “Lord of the Logos” Szpajdel. A press release tells us that the “book is a collection of hundreds of Szpajdel’s powerful hand-drawn nature-inspired logos that combine letters with visual elements from art movements such as art deco and art nouveau.” The publisher has graciously made available several preview pages from the book, and what’s cool about this book is that it isn’tjust a collection of logos; the logos are juxtaposed with the artistic photographs of nature that directly inspired them, like the preview above. I totally see the resemblance, and it’s neat to see that these logos aren’t “just” random scratchy lines.

Check out a very high-quality version of the above image as well as one more that’s equally as cool. The book is 272 pages of full color print and comes out this month for € 35,00 / $ 55,00 / £ 32,50; order it here (when it becomes available).

-VN

Images used with permission By Christophe Szpajdel from Lord of the Logos, Copyright Gestalten 2010

I write books and also for MetalSucks so it’s about time I reviewed some metal books. I’ll start with a few rock autobiographies that have been out for awhile. First up is Nikki Sixx of Mötley Crüe and his needle gazing memoir The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star.

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Holy crap! Daniel Ekeroth‘s ode to Swedish Death Metal called — Swedish Death Metal — received a starred review and was cited as the “Web Exclusive Pick of the Week” in the publishing industry trade’s Bible, Publisher’s Weekly.

PW says Ekeroth “shows a true fan’s dedication in this oral history/band index of the thunderous music scene that emerged from frozen, sparsely-populated Sweden in the ’80s and early ’90s.” Ekeroth’s book also describes how the SDM scene “would echo the ’70s punk revolution in New York and explode with the same powder-keg intensity.”

As a best-selling author who still has never appeared in the pages of Publisher’s Weekly, believe me when I tell you Ekeroth’s inclusion in the rag is a big fuckin’ deal. Not only for him as an author, but also for heavy metal music and literature.

Horns up to Daniel Ekeroth from me and the denizens of MetalSucks!

Check out Swedish Death Metal at Amazon and on MySpace. At least you can tell everyone you read one book this year.

-CM

Even though we pride ourselves on being “smart about metal” here at MetalSucks, that doesn’t mean we don’t know how to have fun. Enter Aye Jay Morano’s Heavy Metal Fun Time Activity Book. Featuring a forward by Andrew W.K. and endorsements by Metalocalypse‘s Brendon Small and the legendary Ronnie James Dio, the book includes such activities as “Hair Metal Crossword Puzzle” (in which the clues are classic song titles – should be a snap for our friend Allyson at Bring Back Glam), “Find the Matching Slayer Logos,” a “Backstage Maze” to help Spinal Tap navigate the backstage area, a “Mike Patton Scramble” (which involves unscrambling the names of all his various bands and side-projects), “How Many Words Can You Make Out Of Yngwie Malmsteen?,” “Connect the Dots and Color Dimebag’s Goatee,” “Dio’s Holy Diver Metal-Libs” (a variation on Mad Libs), and, my personal favorite, a game in which you must correctly identify all five original members of Guns N’ Roses – based solely on their skull portraits from the cover of Appetite for Destruction.

And here’s the best part: the book is only ten bucks! A must-own for metal big-kids everywhere.

(five out five horns)

-AR

Buy Heavy Metal Fun Time Activity Book through MetalSucks

As the most unfairly maligned genre of music, metal is not often the subject of intense intellectual critical studies. That’s why the prospect of Eric Weisbard’s contribution to the popular 33 1/3 series of music criticism books, examining Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I & II, is such an exciting prospect; a close, detailed reading of these two seminal, highly controversial albums that more or less marked the swan song for GN’R is not only potentially thought-provoking, but also seems to provide ample opportunity to break down the barriers of the stereotype that metal is music enjoyed only by non-intellectuals. Unfortunately, Weisbard approaches the material not only as a non-metal fan, but as someone who enjoys GN’R only with the detached irony of an East Village scenester (that he has worked in the past for both The Village Voice and Spin should come as no surprise). Consequently neither as witty nor observant as his former colleague Chuck Klosterman’s vastly superior Fargo Rock City, Weisbard nonetheless provides some interesting, little know factoids and insights into these monumental works. Click to read more…